The FCB Legacy of Slavery Project invites you to join us for a presentation and Q&A session about the Cuban economy with esteemed Cuban economist, Dr. Ricardo Torres-Pérez. A reception with light refreshments will follow.

The presentation will trace Cuba's economic trajectory from the 1959 Revolution to the present. It will open with a brief historical overview of the six-decade confrontation with the United States — from the nationalization of American assets and the resulting embargo to the extraterritorial reach of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act — and how that conflict has shaped the island's economy at every stage. The presentation will then turn to the transformations that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990: the crisis of the "Special Period," the legalization of self-employment and limited foreign investment during the 1990s, the gradual reforms introduced under Raúl Castro after 2008, and the 2021 currency unification and expansion of the private sector. The goal is to give the audience a clear, evidence-based understanding of how decades of internal decisions and external pressure have produced the Cuba we see today.